At first glance it doesn't look like this grand piano is exactly centered on the dolly but it is because its weight is balanced. Remember, the left part of the piano with the keyboard has very little weight compared to the cast iron harp within the rest of the piano's kidney shape. So most of the piano's weight resides from just a little left of the leg brackets to the back end of the piano. If observed with an x-ray vision perspective you'd see that the piano's heavy cast iron harp is centered on the dolly even though the piano's case is not.

Grand pianos have to be broken down (without breaking them of course), by removing their 3 legs and the lyre and mounting them on their long side onto a piano skid board, which is an involved process. But here, we don't want to get too bogged down in our discussion so we suggest you view our 5 minute grand piano moving slideshow presentation on this subject at burrowsmoving.com/resources/piano.swf. Instead, we will here go on to speak in general of all the things that must be done in order to teach you how to move your piano from its origin point to its final destination point.

TIP, LIFT, CHEAT 1 STEP ONLY

The way to move your upright piano over 1 step is that it should be placed on the dolly on its feet because 1 step can be easily traversed on the dolly by just using a slight tip of the piano up / down as it is being pushed along. So, starting at the place where the piano is now sitting, if there will be no more than 1 step on the move path going to / from the truck, the piano is to be lifted or tipped up and onto the piano dolly, placing it on it's feet (on its bottom) onto the dolly's padded rails as shown previously.

To do this you wll use the hump strap to reach under the dolly and lift one end of the piano. This lifting force causes the piano mounted on the dolly to be welded together with the dolly as one unit. In this manner the piano is lifted over the step (as is shown in the picture below). In the moving industry this is called doing a little cheat because we cheat gravity out of one step of carrying effort without having to take the piano off of the dolly and carry it over that step and then put it back onto the dolly.